If you hit the sweet spot on LSD or psilocybin or MDMA... If you hit any of those sweet spots... If you experience something like unconditional love on MDMA or you experience self-transcending unity with nature on psilocybin, it's like experiencing physical perfection of a sort that only the most highly-trained athlete would ever touch. You're just dropped into it, and then you lose it again when you come down, but you realize a state like that is possible.

There are many reasons to take psychedelics, but for me, the one that applies to most people... is that without having had certain experiences, you really have no sense of how limited your normal experience is.

You can have a peak experience through taking psychedelics; you can have a peak experience through going on a meditation retreat and meditating for 14 hours a day for a month. These kinds of experiences can be pretty similar. The difference with psychedelics is that you're guaranteed to have a radical change in the contents of your consciousness, and it's guaranteed to happen more or less within the hour.

Intelligence is the ability to apprehend and perceive what is ... Imagination is the ability to apprehend and perceive what could be. I view creativity as a combination of intelligence and imagination.

The whole structure of social media, for instance, [revolves] around social status and tribalism. You couldn't design a system to bring out the worst in us any better if you intentionally tried to set out for that goal.

If someone gives you an effective dose of LSD or psilocybin, there's no question something's going to happen. It may be a terrifying something, but if nothing else, it will prove to you that experience is a highly plastic thing and it's possible to inhabit states of consciousness that you never dreamed were possible a mere hour ago.

Wisdom is really the ability to hold seemingly incompatible things in your head and recognize your own contradictions—being able to zoom out on yourself and see all those contradictions as part of an integrated whole.

It feels like there's a percentage of the population that has gotten themselves in a place where... It's almost like a badge of honor to be indifferent to the experiences of other people.

Life is always a two-step forward, one-step back dynamic where we're always choosing growth—or always trying to choose growth—but the fear response is always prepotent. Fear and uncertainty are always going to loom over us, but we have to consciously keep choosing the growth option.

There's a difference between noticing thought as an appearance in consciousness among all the other appearances and being identified with thought, which is to say thinking without knowing that you're thinking.

The role of a peak experience... is to convince you that there's more to the landscape of the mind than you may have assumed.

There's more needed in the toolkit for living a truly examined life and becoming a better person than just having certain self-transcending experiences.

There are needs that evolved to be more prepotent than other needs, and when they're severely deprived, they really can overtake the whole person and dominate the whole person. They narrow our worldview, and they make us focus specifically on those things.